Walking is the most ancient form of resistance. Take a hike. Become an ontological vagabond.
There is no morality but aesthetics. Aesthetics improve with movement. Beauty is becoming. Rivers without dams. Unfenced meadows. Antelope. A leap over a wrought iron fence into the White House lawn. Vagueness. Unleashed fury with a smile.
The Apparatus is the enemy of beauty in motion. MOMA – The Museum of Modern Atherosclerosis. Thick walls. Razor wires. Row crops. Chicago’s Magnificent Mile of crappy products. Military formations. Parapets. Missile silos. The grid. Endless fields of wind turbines and solar panels. Sprawl. Modernity. It’s all a damn ugly shame.
The priests tell us that everything is determined. God has a plan. Some plan. Send in the second-string deity to call an audible.
On Monday morning, look closely and discover that the Apparatus is embarrassingly flaccid, sagging, poorly disguised as a pointy-headed missile. Its paint is chipping. There is rust beneath its rhetoric. Oxidation eats away the nations. The seven wonders of the world are all rubble, returning. Praise be to the second-string deity! Thy will be done.
The Apparatus is subject to a more ancient will, older than ziggurats and iron spears and algorithms. Preceding and succeeding civilization is wilderness. Wilderness. The wil-der-ness. The will of the forest. Eternal recurrence. Rotting leaves, decomposing to compost, dying in order to live, with no regard or need for the Apparatus. Decay defies civilization’s decadence.
Rotting leaves become resurrection juice. We only have life if we have forests. The forest is a veritable fountain of youth. Ponce de Leon found it but proceeded to drain it to make way for all those ghoulish children and their wretched parents trapsing about Disney World.
The Apparatus cut down all the trees and offered us a hyberbaric sleep chamber, subdivisions, gated communities, where you play it safe to remain half alive. This explains pop culture’s fascination with vampires. The Twilight of the American Idols.
The half alive cadavers appear mobile within the Apparatus, relocating every two years from one ugly tomb to the next. They call it a promotion. I’ve had a few of those. Pro-motion?! What a misnomer. Anti-motion, more like it. Same desk. Different building. That’s all.
I’ve seen all those rising stars, trapped in their nine-to-five caskets, at least while the sun is out. By night, they stalk the fast-food court to satisfy their diabetic cravings, scrolling Facebook for a friend, getting high on ESPN, CNN. Surely this is what we could say sin looks like. I intentionally say “looks like”. It is an aesthetic problem. It is a fat, lazy, ugly life. This is the not-quite-life in the Apparatus. Death warmed over in a microwave. And so many have accepted this as the norm.
There is no norm, no morality. It is the lie of the Apparatus. There is becoming. Flowing water. Fire in the hole. Panta rhei. The Cynic’s knapsack. Rotting leaves. Dirty-rotten vagabonds jumping fences, traveling with the wind, dusting off the empire from their worn sandals.